Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

Parashat Va-yeishev 5759

Genesis 37:1 - 40:23
December 12, 1998 23 Kislev 5759

Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

For the ancients, dreams often conveyed a divine communication about the
future. For us moderns, raised in the shadow of Freud, dreams are an
expression of our unconscious desires made manifest through
dissimilation. Freud took as the motto for his pathbreaking
Interpretation of Dreams, published at the end of 1899, a line from
Virgil's Aeneid: "If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the
infernal regions," which summarized his thesis. Desires censored by the
defenses of our "higher mental authorities" would resort to the realm of
our "mental underworld (the unconscious)" to achieve their ends (Peter
Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time, p. 105). Nowhere does the
secularization of the modern mind find more striking articulation than
in the view that dreams are no longer regarded as an emanation from
above but rather as an eruption from below.

Though God's presence recedes in the Joseph narrative, dreams play a
prominent role in anticipating things to come, provided they are
properly understood. Some are instantly self-evident; others are
maddeningly elusive. Joseph displays a talent undetected in his
immediate ancestors. Not only is he, like them, a recipient of dreams
with divine content, but he is uniquely able to intuit the meaning of
others' dreams. His own dreams quickly lead to his downfall at home;
his ability to interpret dreams leads to his eventual triumph in Egypt.

Not until near the end of the Hebrew Bible in the figure of Daniel do we
come across another man endowed with that same special capacity. And
again it is the key to Daniel's swift ascent from captivity to the royal
court. A victim of the Babylonian exile, Daniel is perceived to be not
only learned and wise, but also "understanding of visions and dreams of
all kinds (Daniel 1:17)." Thus when King Nebuchadnezzar has, like
Pharaoh before him, a deeply disturbing dream which he can't recall, it
is Daniel who, to the astonishment of all the king's sages, not only
recovers it but then explains it (chapter 2).

The Rabbis, who transformed the religion of ancient Israel into Judaism,
retain a modicum of belief that dreams or any state of unfocused
consciousness may serve as a mediator of the divine will. For example,
if you rise early and a specific verse of the Torah comes to mind, there
is a touch of prophecy at work here (B.T. Berakhot 57b). The content of
the verse carries some kind of divine message. Similarly, if at a
critical juncture, you turn to a youngster studying Scripture and ask
her what specific verse she is reading at the moment, that verse bears
some relationship to your life (B.T. Hagiga 15a). In my own experience,
while davening, I am often struck by an unexpected insight that I
treasure as a form of divine responsiveness to my drawing near to God.

We humans populate the world with symbols. The Rabbis assert that five
everyday phenomena embody a tiny fraction of a greater whole. Thus fire
constitutes one-sixtieth of purgatory; honey, one-sixtieth of manna;
Shabbat, one-sixtieth of the world-to-come; sleep, one-sixtieth of
death and a dream but one-sixtieth of prophecy (B.T. Berakhot 57b). Put
more abstractly, existence transcends what we are capable of
experiencing. Our senses are not only our windows to the world; they
are also our constraints. The recurring experience of dreaming,
sleeping and celebrating Shabbat is a foretaste of realms beyond our
ken, though not our imagination.

In truth, it is the imagination that the Rabbis seek to rein in. The
equation employed is far less than one to one. The fraction of
one-sixtieth is in halakhic terms negligible, too small to make a
difference. If you inadvertently spill a drop of milk into a pot of
chicken soup, if the ratio between the two is one-sixtieth or less then
the soup is unaffected and edible. Hence while the Rabbis affirm that
dreaming may still be a form of divine communication, it is actually a
crude and unreliable instrument. The fraction of one-sixtieth suggests
a good deal of skepticism, lots of room for error.

Indeed, in the post Bar-Kochba era in the latter half of the second
century, the Rabbis curbed prophecy itself. The era of prophetic
communication was over, having ended some 700 years before with the last
of the minor prophets - Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. In their own
period, the Rabbis dared to avow that "the sage was to be preferred to
the prophet," by which they meant to vindicate their own leadership
(B.T. Bava Batra 12a). God's voice was no longer accessible directly,
but only indirectly. The interpretation of Scripture through
painstaking study became the only valid manner of detecting God's will.
In third-century Palestine, Rabbi Yochanan went so far as to declaim
that since the destruction of the Temple (i.e. the Second), prophecy was
to be found only among fools and children (B.T. Bava Batra 12b).

Behind this mounting aversion to prophecy was the unmitigated disaster
of three failed Jewish rebellions against the Roman Empire between
66-134 fueled by messianic fervor that had thrown caution to the wind.
According to Josephus, who chronicled the first uprising which led to
the destruction of the Second Temple, prior to the year 66 C.E.
Palestine was overrun by messianic pretenders who incited Jews weary of
Roman misrule. "Deceivers and impostors, under the pretense of divine
inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, they persuaded the
multitude to act like madmen, and led them out into the desert under the
belief that God would there give them tokens of deliverance (The Jewish
War, book II, line 259)."

It is no accident, therefore, that Rabbi Judah the Prince's Mishna,
which appears around the year 200, is a thoroughly prosaic legal
compendium, without an iota of apocalyptic tension. The job description
of his students, who were rapidly assuming the religious leadership of
the nation, is not to keep the embers of messianism burning, but rather
to administer the courts, instruct advanced students of Torah and keep
the canon pliable through exegesis (Pirkei Avot 1:1). And the Mishna
closes poignantly extolling the blessing of peace. There is no final
plea for national redemption. Concomitantly, dreams, like prophecy,
have been confined to the dustbin of history in an effort to keep
religious enthusiasm in check.